Monthly Archives: November 2012

At Optic Fusion, we employ a Hot Aisle/Cold Aisle (HA/CA) layout in our data center. HA/CA has widely become the accepted best practice for cabinet layout in data centers, largely because of the efficiency of HA/CA when compared to strictly Hot Aisle (HA) or Cold Aisle (CA) designs. Traditionally, data centers have attempted to merely force cold air into a hot room to stabilize the temperature. Such designs lead to uneven cooling, and are wildly inefficient: it takes additional fan power and more, colder air to stabilize the temperature of a hot room. Our HA/CA design focuses on completely refreshing the air in our data center. Instead of attempting to cool down the air in the room, we replace the hot air with cold air, and draw the hot air out of the data center completely. This model is remarkably energy efficient, and allows for even room-cooling, thus keeping the hardware safe from heat damage.

Like some traditional designs we employ air conditioners and fans. However instead of raised floors, we use overhead vents for our cooling infrastructure, focusing on separation of the inlet cold air and the exhaust hot air. The cabinets are placed into a series of rows. The fronts of the racks face each other, creating cold aisles, and the backside of the racks–where the exhaust is located–face each other, thus creating a hot aisle. Air Conditioners pump cold air through our specially designed tubing which dumps the cold air into the cold aisle between the racks. As the cold air moves through the servers, it is heated and dissipated into the hot aisle. The exhaust air is then routed back to the air handlers, where it is moved outside of the facility. /This design allows us to completely refresh the air in our data center every 2.5 minutes/. Optic Fusion’s data center design is both exceptionally efficient and effective at cooling, but it also conserves energy. This means that not only can we provide lower prices to our clients, but also that our system is better for the environment.